Volume 42, Issue 3

Language problems and language barriers are challenges facing not only immigrants but also minorities and people in rural/semirural areas. This study examines individuals’ bi- and multilingual repertoires, language practices and attitudes in a Hokkien-speaking community in Kangar, a semirural town of northern Malaysia bordering Thailand. Through questionnaire surveys and interviews, we investigate how these notions can be used as a means to understand/reflect bilingualism and multilingualism and, more importantly, the potential disparity between what people want to do/say and what people eventually manage to do/say. While there is a shift in language practice from a local- and ancestral origin-induced pattern towards a more “global” and “pan-Chinese” paradigm, the findings also reveal the linguistic “dislocations” of the Hokkien-speaking community across ALL generations regardless of ethnicity. The language issues in the community reflect—and are likely to be reflections of—society at large. The vast contrast between individual/societal linguistic aspirations and the actual linguistic repertoire/communicative competence among the locals indicates the need to redress an absence of major efforts to close urban-rural/city-town/dominant-dominated social divides across the (language) education landscape at the national level.

Variationist researchers are increasingly adopting intersectionality approaches to analyse identity-linked practice. However, the field of sociolinguistic variation is yet to embrace the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework. The current paper offers a new method for integrating intersectional approaches into variationist studies by operationalising Blommaert, Jan & Anna De Fina. 2017. Chronotopic identities: On the timespace organization of who we are. In Anna De Fina & Jeremy Wegner (eds.), Diversity and super-diversity , 1–14. Washington: Georgetown University Press chronotopic frame theory. This method is used to examine how the intersectionality of ethnic, national, and peer-group identities is structured and reproduced in different ways through Chinese Indonesian youths’ selection of multilingual variants of an agreement marker in their peer-to-peer interactions at educational institutions in Pontianak city, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The results illustrate how chronotopic frame approaches to studying identity-linked variation heed calls for integrations of intersectionality to move beyond accounting for intracategorical complexity and instead examine the dynamic mutual constitution of social categories that better represents marginalised people’s lived experiences.

The research question of the present paper is the following: to what degree (if any) is gender relevant as an explanatory factor in, firstly, the process of assimilation and later, the process of (re)vitalisation of indigenous and minority languages in northern Fenno-Scandia (the North Calotte)? The assimilation of the ethnic groups in question was a process initiated and lead by the authorities in the three different countries. Finland, Sweden and Norway. Nevertheless, members of the indigenous and minority groups also took part in practicing, though, not necessarily promoting, the official assimilation politics, for different reasons. (Re)vitalisation, on the other hand, was initially – and still is – mostly a process stemming from the minority groups themselves, though the authorities to a certain extent have embraced it. The paper thus addresses the question of whether gender played a role in the two different processes, assimilation and (re)vitalisation, and if that was the case, how and why.

The Maybachufer Market is an urban street market in Berlin-Neukölln that constitutes a highly diverse urban context by bringing together people of different social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Through linguistic ethnography, this paper explores the negotiation of various resources in everyday communicative practices and activities of this urban space. The market setting with its multiethnic and multilingual community constitutes a spatial repertoire with a rich pool of resources. Although German, Turkish, and English are prominent as local and international lingua francas, various other languages and resources are used in the market activities involving different types and modes of interaction. The study shows that the respective communicative practices, which seem random at first glance, in fact follow specific interactional patterns with respect to communicative goals and interactional roles, including different social relations and identity constructions. While exploring everyday activities and the linguistic behaviours at a highly diverse urban market, the study contributes to our understanding of spatial repertoires, metrolingual and convivial practices, and communicative patterns in multilingual and multiethnic interactions in highly diverse urban spaces.

This article is based on texts recorded during field studies carried out in Daugavpils in the summer of 2019. It compares the language of two representatives of older-generation intelligentsia and juxtaposes the findings with materials from an unpublished doctoral thesis by Małgorzata Ostrówka Współczesna polszczyzna mówiona na Łotwie (“Contemporary Spoken Polish Language in Latvia”). The author collected her material in the 1990s. In this article we describe both the contemporary and past sociolinguistic situation highlighting changes that occurred in the Polish language.